It has been a year. 365 days since the black box went silent, since the final radar blip vanished. For the families of the 237 souls on board Flight 402, the calendar has become a countdown of anguish. And this week, Whitehall is finally ready to speak.
The Air Accidents Investigation Branch will publish its final report on Thursday. The document will be over 500 pages. The politics inside it will be explosive.
Sources familiar with the draft tell me the report pins the blame squarely on a catastrophic cascade of failures. Not a single bolt, but a system. Maintenance logs were fudged. Regulators looked the other way. The airline's CEO, who still holds his seat, will face a grilling at the Transport Select Committee within hours of the release.
But let's be clear about what this is really about. This is not just a technical inquiry. This is a political bloodletting. The Secretary of State for Transport has been privately briefing that his department was ‘kept in the dark’ by the Civil Aviation Authority. The CAA, in turn, is pointing fingers at the European Aviation Safety Agency, blaming post-Brexit transition gaps. It is the oldest game in Westminster: pass the parcel of responsibility. The parcel is filled with lives.
I have spoken to three families this week. They are exhausted. They are angry. ‘We have been told nothing for a year,’ one father told me. ‘Every time we asked for answers, we got a press release. Now they will give us a report. But what does a report change?’
That sentiment is the ticking bomb under this story. The AAIB is independent. But its findings land in a political vacuum. The government has already announced a review of aviation safety. That is code for kicking the can to a new committee. No resignations. No prosecutions. Just more consultations.
Don’t expect the PM to say much. Downing Street is nervous. The PM knows this report will be weaponised by the opposition. The Labour frontbench has already tabled a Commons motion demanding a full public inquiry. They smell blood.
But here is the irony. The public has largely moved on. Aviation remains the safest form of transport. Journalists like me are the ones holding a flame for a story that most people find too painful to dwell on. The real tension is not in the report. It is in the hearts of those left behind.
What remains when a plane falls from the sky? Fragments. A black box. A list of failures. And a year of waiting for the one thing that will never arrive: closure.
The report will come out at 10am. I will be in the press gallery. The families will be somewhere else, probably in a hotel room near the AAIB headquarters, waiting for a phone call. The game of politics will begin at noon. But the game has already been played. And we all lost.
